What does Veeky Forums think of Walter Kaufmann? Was he a good scholar or did he sanitize Nietzsche for liberal America?

What does Veeky Forums think of Walter Kaufmann? Was he a good scholar or did he sanitize Nietzsche for liberal America?

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As I'm a native German speaker, I don't have to rely on his translation in order to read NEET-zsche, but from what I've heard, yeah, he did basically make him sound softer and less "controversial" than he actually was. Could be wrong though, so take it with a grain of salt desu.

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>By: lenazifrog
okay which one of you did this

*casts his gaze innocently to the ground*

>did he sanitize Nietzsche for liberal America?

Yeah, that's what he did.

Luckily we have guys like Michael A. Scarpitti who are giving us the raw Nietzsche nowadays.

Is he the best Nietzsche translator?

He and a couple of other guys have worked on the most recent Penguin publications of a few Nietzsche works.

They're definitely better, but in the introduction to Will to Power they acknowledge the debt they owe to Kaufmann. They like his style of translation (in terms of the flow/etc), but nonetheless recognize the rose-tinted glasses with which he viewed Nietzsche.

Are you referring to Hollingdale?

Are Ludovici's translations any good?

"he ultimately joined the war effort against the Nazis by serving in U.S. intelligence"

He's a shill

how does that impact his work? I'm genuinely curious how that fact discredits his work.

ever heard of propaganda?

>Jewish
>served against the Nazis
>after America and, by extension, liberalism had won over the Nazis, he became a Nietzsche scholar and set out to prove that Nietzsche wasn't racist/sexist/proto-Nazi, effectively neutering one of the most vitriolically anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic philosophers
People genuinely believe that Nietzsche was an individualist and told people to just b themselves. His translations are good but his book Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist is the reason he's so popular in the Anglosphere: because he explains away everything about Nietzsche that offends liberal sensibilities.

all his reviews are pretty funny

Thanks for the post, are there any Nietzsche scholars whose work isn't polluted by Kaufmann's reinterpretation?
t. spoonfed nietzsche babby

I've read a handful of translations and haven't seen anything in Kaufmann's that seemed to make Nietzsche sympathetic to liberal values. I can't speak for his writing on Nietzsche tho.

>Nietzsche wasn't racist/sexist/proto-Nazi
>effectively neutering one of the most vitriolically anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic philosophers
The second part of what you say has a lot of truth to it but none of those things are necessarily connected to the first. Was he racist? Probably within normal standards of the day. Was he sexist? Probably, but again within what was common. Were the things you said in the second bit true? Yes. Was he a sort of proto-Nazi? Certainly not.

>or did he sanitize Nietzsche for liberal America?
People like to say this but never give any concrete examples. At best they throw out the Nazi accusation which is less than insipid.

I don't get how you can possibly get a "sanitized" Nietzsche from reading Kaufmann's translations.

What I got was an extremely elitist and aristocratic individual who had delusions of grandeur about saving Western civilization.

>I don't get how you can possibly get a "sanitized"
If someone is a 10 on the mad scale and someone else translates and annotates them to make them appear an 8 they will still look pretty mad but a sanitisation has taken place. Nietzsche is an explosive thinker, no amount of emphasis can change this.

See His translations are fine. A translation is a translation. You can only twist it so much.

It's Kaufmann's actual interpretation of Nietzsche that's sanitized to hell and back.

Well I have only read Kaufmann's translations, and even if what you say is true, it's not like I didn't get why Nietzsche is a controversial figure from it.

>People genuinely believe that Nietzsche was an individualist and told people to just b themselves
People misunderstanding Nietzsche != him being misrepresented

Any degree of nuance or suggestion that your life won't be great is completely alien in society in Western society and causes all kinds of mental gymnastics. That should be clear with how hugely and hilariously misused the idea of the ubermensch is. Most people actually think it translates to some kind of self improvement ending with you being a celebrity millionaire or something.

I guess that explains why Jordan Peterson is a Nazi.

lol

Kaufmann provided a huge service, if not for him continental writers wouldn't be half as well known as they are now due to the bitterness after WW2. He helped bridge the west beyond Nazi bullshit.

is mmbn Veeky Forums?

I second this

I have read all of N's work and have read Kaufmann's book as well. K does paint N in a more forgiving light, but he doesn't sanitize him as much as people here seem to be claiming. He is accurate and a good guide when it comes to N's anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-capitalist arguments. And he is excellent at succinctly and comprehensibly explaining much of N's ideas. I would only read K AFTER you have read N's work's yourself though. That is really the only way to judge a scholar writing about a philosopher's works. Anyway, K provides a lot of great and diverse examples from N's books to contextualize his comments about Jews and some of his more controversial statements on violence and suffering. What it basically comes down to is that yes, N criticized Jews, but he criticized nearly EVERYONE. He also praised some of the qualities of the Jewish people, very highly indeed. And the groups he criticized most unforgivingly were German, nationalist, anti-Semites.

The only thing that I think Kaufmann does significantly soften to the detriment of his credit as an N scholar is N's views on women. His sexism/misogyny. K does this by basically dismissing N's comments about women as invalid because they are products of his time, and can be discarded without losing any valuable insight into N's philosophy. This is not true. Yes, N was a sexist, but a lot of the shit he says about women is TRUE, i.e he accurately diagnoses and points out the faults of a certain TYPE of woman, the type that was prevalent in 1800's Europe and a type that is still very much wide spread today! N's mistake was to speak as if ALL women were like this, inherently, rather than as a result of a mix of inherent biological traits and socialization. There are men today who are in essence the types of weak superficial females that N hated so much.

>forgiving
>holding big N culpable
Going to be hard to read the rest of your post.

point taken. was using "forgiving light" as colloquial phrase, not really intending the word "forgiving" in the literal sense.

He understood Nietzsche and the classics that created him. That's far more than can be said of most.

>her
Yep he is a true garbaggio jew

It's an appropriate parallel since Pandora was female and a prototypical eve, it follows to compare her against another her, Antigone.